User Experience Design

Services

What we did

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1. The Challenge

Deliver an engaging mobile experience while driving sales and membership

The QBD site we inherited wasn’t ‘broken’ generally speaking, it was however in need of being revived due to a few small issues. The business felt the site didn’t speak directly to it’s industry standing, product offering and didn’t engage their audience visually, especially on mobile devices.

Aside from this, by applying UX thinking, we would also be able to improve book sales and encourage greater membership sign ups.

2. Our Thinking:

Let’s start with Mobile-First and go from there

During our kick-off session, the team agreed to tackle the Mobile experience first as it would require deeper thinking. We agreed to strip back the mobile experience as one of our pet peeves is borrowing directly from desktop. To achieve this, we planned on running an internal exercise where we would define and prioritise mobile features and then present them to the client.

We weren’t interested in reinventing the wheel. Visually, we agreed to enhance the UI by cleaning it up, stripping it back and adding more negative space to improve readability especially after considering QBD had managed to hold on to their 50+ year old demographic. This approach would also remove any distractions surrounding the book cover images.

3.Our Process:

Run with a Lean UX Thinking Approach and iterate quickly

We were fortunate to receive useful Google Analytics data which we combined with the client’s own user data to develop a set of personas. We included QBD’s customer support and service team as well as their marketing team to gain deeper insight into their audience and their behaviour.

Internally, we ran an affinity diagram exercise to define and prioritise existing bugs/issues and features we believe would solve specific problems. We also sketched out a few user journeys to analyse any differences in persona behaviour (which in the end was a massive win for the client).

We eventually ran an internal design studio session, which took around half a day, and since we had the client on stand by, we were able to present initial sketches to them by early afternoon. After receiving quick feedback, we were able to continue iterating and refining our sketches.

This entire process didn’t take more than 5 days, which meant we had more time for visual design.

4. Our Solution

Immediate uplift in engagement and membership sign up

The most noticeable improvement was the amount of users interacting with the search feature, which was placed within the header. Customers were able to find the right product quicker than before, also thanks to the autosuggest function.

From a mobile perspective, users were now spending more time browsing and adding items to their wish list and in turn, buying more items.

We designed a solution, which was visually simple, keeping UI minimal while focusing on the products themselves with fewer distractions. Items were more accessible as we had reduced clutter, adding more white space and removing unessential elements.